Even Rapunzel Cut Her Hair, Yo

February 26, 2010

I don’t claim to understand what it is, exactly, that makes girls girls and boys boys and women women and men men and whatever identities lay within and between these categories of gender, but I do think that I can say, with some authority, this: it’s not hair. Really, it’s not.

I say this because I know. I know because, I have had short hair. As a child, even:

That’s me, age two and a half. Just a little bit younger than Shiloh Pitt-Jolie, and with a slightly shorter and slightly dodgier haircut. (Parents didn’t worry about their daughters having mullets in the seventies, I’m just sayin’.) And I’m pretty sure that, notwithstanding the short, bemulleted hairdo, I was a girl. I also wore pants a lot, but you know what? STILL A GIRL.

(And yes, I know that there’s something vaguely ironic about the fact that I am championing haircuts for girls just days after flipping out over haircuts for boys, but that had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with OH GOD MY BABY IS GROWING UP SAVE ME. In any case, as I told you: I am complicated. And it all, clearly, goes back to the hair.)